Hi Vanessa

Just playing with my blog here.

Web usability benefits Toronto

Web usability is about making your website in such a way that your site users can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

Usability redesign increases the sales/conversion rate by 100% and traffic by 150%

Jakob Nielson, web usability expert

Increase in (return) site visitors

• More than 83% of Internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel they have too many clicks to find what they’re looking for (source: Arthur Andersen)
• 58% of visitors who experience usability problems on a website did not return (source: Forrester Research³)
• People can’t find the information they’re seeking on a website about 60% of the time, due to usability issues (source: User Interface Engineering⁴)

Increase in sales

• $25 billion is lost every year due to website usability issues (source: Zona Research)
• The average e-commerce site could increase its sales by 79% with a usability redesign (source: Jakob Nielson)
• E-commerce sites commonly drive away nearly half of repeat business by making it difficult for visitors to find the information they need (source: Harley Manning)

Faster download time

Usability studies have shown that Internet users don’t hang around much longer than 8.6 seconds for a page to download (source: Andrew B. King - Speed Up Your Site).  Do your web pages download in time? Check for yourself at with the Web Page Analyser - if the download time is more than 8.6 seconds then your website could be losing site visitors on a regular basis.

Less Is More - How to keep your website clutter-free

All glitz and fizz
The past was about “bells and whistles”. Websites were designed to showcase the technology behind the web rather than to be an effective communications medium. Flash was used to “excite” and “engage” - its effect however was often the opposite. And web navigation was sometimes an experiment in obscurity making it almost impossible for the visitor to find their way around. Entertainment was the mantra rather than communication effectiveness.We want it now
There are often only a handful of reasons or actions for which the majority of visitors will be at your site. They want to complete the task in hand e.g find a price, book a ticket or get directions with minimum fuss.

Unless a site is quick and easy to use it will be a barrier rather than a gateway. Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, suggests users spend on average less than 2 minutes on a website. The key to engaging visitors” must therefore be simplicity over complexity; the need is less not more - less clutter, less blurb and fewer barriers.

Why clutter-free design
“When we”re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we”ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click…

…We”re thinking “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), while the user”s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles an hour.” –Steve Krug, Don”t Make Me Think

The Internet is clearly a different form of communication to more established media such as printed literature. However, it is only in recent years that its intrinsic differences have begun to make an impact on web design. I cannot count the number of times I”ve heard of clients asking their web designer to “put our brochure online” - a brief that reflects a common lack of appreciation of the web as a powerful but very different medium.

Ensuring that the design and layout of our web pages suit the medium they are used in will help to ensure a positive user experience.

Let”s look at a few practical ways of doing more with less to make things simpler for our visitors:

1) Make pages easy to scan
It”s a well recognised fact now amongst web professionals that people rarely read pages online - they scan, or “speed read”. Therefore, if the information they need is not readily available they will move on - and quickly. Sensible use of headings, subheadings and bullet-points help bring a logical hierarchy to the page and allow visitors eyes to scan through the page efficiently to find the information they needallows visitors eyes to scan through efficiently to find the information they need.

2) Give me some [white] space
Subtle and thoughtful use of space in page design helps guide a visitor”s eyes to important information. It also helps to bring logical definition to different areas of a page, which lightens the load on our brains and allows us to focus on the task in hand.

3) Copy? Reduce it
Visitors often won”t have the time or inclination to read pages and pages of text in the hope of finding what they”re after. We need to prune our web copy to suit the medium - get rid of paragraphs and sentences that don”t add value.

4) Simplify site structure
Make sure that the sections of the site are divided up logically and that the navigation is clear and logical. Reduce the number of steps it takes
to complete tasks, especially when they lead to revenue generation - such as the checkout process on an e-commerce site.

5) Follow standards
When it comes to labelling navigation links, it”s a good idea to follow standards that have evolved with web development. For example, with contact details rather than giving it a navigation label, “call for more information/our offices”, the standard would be “contacts” or “contact us”.

In closing…
Some might suggest that these principles constrain creativity. However, I believe that the “less is more” philosophy heightens the need for a more creative approach to communicating ideas and messages - communicating an idea in 10 words is a lot harder than using 100 words.

About the Author:

Visit Jeremy Jarvis at reflex.net.

www.silentblast.com

The Future Of Web Design Is Content Management!

Web development has greatly increased in popularity over the last 5 years. Many new design concepts, code standards, and technology advances have happened in a short amount of time. With that, so has the knowledge and demand for better, more independent and functional web design packages.More and more we are starting to see a shift in consumer demand for the increasingly popular website content management system.

Most website owners are typical business entrepreneurs who don’t have the time to chase down their web design company for some minor updates that usually cost an arm and a leg. Updates for websites are becoming more and more necessary. Its now a reality and a trend that in order to make something happen with your website online, you need to stay on top of things and create new content to keep visitors coming back.

As entrepreneurs, we all get new creative ideas almost every day on how to improve our products or services. Without the ability to update our own websites, those fresh, new ideas may not become a reality for a long time.

Website Content Management Systems Are The Future:

This is somewhat of a call out to all web design companies. If you cannot offer content management to your clients, you may be left in the dust within a few years. The more affordable content management becomes, the more in demand it will be. Without giving your prospects this crucial option, you may lose a great chunk of your potential clients to the next web design company that has a fully automated system that states: all the consumer has to do is login and get started.

Granted, there will always be a need for web designers. That is an understatement but with the option of content management, you can also decrease the amount of work needed to put into each project and concentrate more on marketing your business and its services.

Content Management Gives The Consumer The Freedom They Need!

Without giving too much freedom that may make the website look bad, there is a high demand for the ability to update a website when needed, not when convenient. People like to have power over managing their own company, content management gives them the freedom they need to expand on their own terms, without extra costs.

Here Are Typical Features Of A CMS:

- Add/remove/edit pages.
- Update content within each page.
- Add images where needed.
- Update contact information.
- Show updated listings (i.e. Real estate listings, Mortgage rates).
- Add new tips on their industry everyday (The spawn of blogging).
+ Many extra features not listed here.

Take The Real Estate Industry For Example:

In the last 2 years, Real Estate Content Management Systems are popping up everywhere we look. I can recall reviewing over 50 websites that offer this style of service. And why not! Real estate agents as a whole spend a great deal of money marketing themselves. Just in the last couple of years, real estate agents have seen more value in marketing online than they have through regular print media. Many real estate agents I know would rather spend $10,000 for a website rather than spend $10,000 getting listed in the yellow pages.

In Conclusion:

If you offer web design services and have (CMS) Content Management Systems available to your visitors, this might be the time to consider this ever growing popular service for your company. You will not regret putting in the effort of developing your own system and marketing it, there is a shifting demand for this ever-popular freedom online.

About the Author:

Martin Lemieux is the owner of the Smartads Advertising Network helping companies like yours to increase your business further! International: http://www.smartads.info Ezine Article Directory: http://www.article99.com RSS/XML Feed: http://www.article99.com/RSS/Martin-R-Lemieux.xml

www.silentbast.com

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website’s Legibility

Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they’re easy to correct. Let’s jump right in and look at five easy fixes:

1. Format your text using CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go - use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.

2. Make the font size big enough to read.

Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

3. Make the text contrast with its background.

The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.

4. Give the lines room to breathe.

Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

5. Break text up into chunks.

No matter how good a writer you are, people don’t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors - it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.

Making your website’s content more legible is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that’s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.

Copyright 2006, Debbie Campbell

Plan for a Toronto eCommerce Website.

Getting set up to create your own Toronto internet business selling products online can seem like an overwhelming project, but it actually just involves following a proven process mixed in with some creative ingenuity and the discipline to see the project through. We will touch on a few of the most important points in this article. All of this starts with creating a plan of action and then executing.

First you need to figure out what you want to sell. To verify your options, you have to do some research to see if there is a demand for this product or service and whether it is currently being sold successfully online.

Check your local discount stores and large online chains like Amazon to see if they already sell this product. Unless your product has some unique or valuable feature to distinguish it from others,your customers are going to go to big discount stores, or buy online from a large retailer.

After this research is complete, if you are still excited about the opportunity of online business, you will next need to establish your business (choosing your business ‘type’ - sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability partnership, corporation, etc.). You will need to choose a business type that gives you the best tax benefit, and the most protection against liability (if your product or service may expose you to legal action).

You will get a Tax ID number when you set up your business. This number allows you to collect state sales tax and establishes your ability to buy products wholesale so you can re-sell these products on your web site.

Next, you will need a business bank account. Some banks require you to wait three months after your business paperwork is filed, before you can open a business account.

Since your business is an online business, you will have to get a ‘domain’ name. This name is the name of your web site and the ‘address’ your customers will type into their web browser when they want to visit your site.

You should be prepared with several options and spin-offs of the name you think you want, since your first choice may not be available. If the name is already registered to another business, you will not be able to use it for YOUR web site. The next item on your list is to find a web host. A web hosting company will store all the files that make up your web site, including a database of information, prices, and content. Some web hosting companies are much cheaper than others. However, you have to look at the features and services your web host will offer before you choose the host that is right for you.

Next, you will need to decide if you are going to design your own web site or hire professionals to do it for you. You can compromise by purchasing web ‘templates’ from a professional company. With a little training and a little effort, you can learn to update these templates to change or add information to your web site.

Whether you are designing your own web site or hiring professionals, you need to figure out what ‘content’ you want on your site. Will you have educational information, write articles, provide a description of your services or just sell products?

If you are selling products or services on your web site, you will need some way to accept payments. Make no mistake you MUST provide a method to accept payments on the spot, rather than asking your customer to send a check or money order. If you intend to be recognized as a professional business, you must offer your customers a simple way to order your products.

After you have done all these things, you will need to either stock your product or hire your employees to perform services.

Your web designer (maybe YOU) will have to consider advertising techniques and other methods to get customers to find and buy from your web site.

As you can see, starting an online business is a significant investment in time and effort. Your expenses may not be high, but you do have to put in the planning time and ensure that you have thought through all the aspects of the business.

The bottom line for prospective online business entrepreneurs is to consider the time and effort, the cost and the findings from your research.

THEN, decide whether you really think you can pull this off!

Article written by Will Cook.

Separating the Content from its Presentation

The main idea behind the concept of separating the content from its presentation is to allow website developers a useful framework to develop their website giving them the ability to change the website’s appearance whenever they like without needing to redo the content structure. This article will explain the rationale behind separating content from presentation.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t just one method for implementing this concept. More than that, since the introduction of technologies such as CGI, ASP, and PHP that allow web developers to generate dynamic web pages, a lot of companies have found creative ways to develop their website applications using this concept as their foundation.

Over the past few years, the internet community has been trying to create a set of standards for creating web sites. A new technology called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has been introduced. There is nothing actually new in the way CSS handles a web page’s presentation. CSS allows the developer to define a style for each html tag element. This is similar to the method developers (programmers) used in the old days when they attached a variable to each html tag defining its style. The major difference is that CSS style definitions can be interpreted by most of the existing browsers available while in the older method the dynamic web page engine performs the interpretation.

The internet standards organization W3C has encouraged the use of CSS by enhancing its ability to control the web page’s look and feel. New style options have been added to the CSS specifications that have not been added to the HTML description language. There’s no doubt that this was a smart move. It’s forced web developers to use CSS to achieve an attractive web page that also supports the principle of content separation. Unfortunately CSS did not find its way into the internet mainstream easily because of compatibility issues with most web browsers. These days CSS is widely supported by most of the major web browsers, while CSS2, an enhanced version of CSS still has serious compatibility issues.

Obviously, the separation of content from its presentation deals not only with the styling aspects, but also with browser compatibility issues. The styling aspects were the first to be handled by web developers and web designers. As the complexity of information technology (IT) systems become increasingly more difficult to maintain, the internet community is looking for a solution that will become a standard so that content can be easily be managed. One goal for this standard is to define a “language” that IT systems can “talk” with each other and exchange information. Large corporations have historically used many different software platforms in their networks to conduct business. Internet based applications can provide a single platform that can act as an intermediary between all of these different systems and allow communication between them.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as a standard to present the content itself. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a close relative of XML that has been widely used by financial institutions who have been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to transmit orders and invoices over private networks, intranets and the internet for several years.

The need to present the content in a standard way that separates it from any design elements was so urgent that for the first time in software development history all the three major players (SUN, IBM, and Microsoft) actually agreed with each other and XML become a standard almost overnight and was adopted by many content providers and news agencies.

Yet the concept was not fully implemented. CSS handles the styling aspects while XML handles the document content. What about the webpage layout? New websites are been published each day by thousands. Every day millions of new web pages are being added to the internet’s global database. Webmasters have found that changing the page background color or the font color might not be enough to keep their website fresh and polished to compete with other new websites. However, changing the website layout can sometimes involve a lot of effort because it involves modifying the web page source code. XSL was introduced to solve that issue. Consider XSL a set of rules that can describe a web page layout. Combine it with XML (and optionally with CSS) you will get a valid html file.

XSL is very similar in its mechanics as any other dynamic web page generator. Beside the fact that XSL is platform independent, its biggest advantage is that it can be processed on the client side. The web server sends the client the content using XML format and the layout definition using XSL format. By doing that, the load on the web server’s CPU is reduced allowing it to perform other tasks more quickly. However, XSL was not adopted by all the major web browsers. So unlike XML, XSL has not found its way to the market easily.

Before you run back to your desk and start redesigning your website according to these magnificent standards, you should be aware that those technologies are really not needed most of the time. In fact, using them unnecessarily can cause performance problems. CSS usually will not cause your system to slow down. Just try to keep your CSS file as small as possible. Many web developers maintain large CSS files with lots of unused style definitions. Deciding to work with XML is a serious decision. If your website generates dynamic web pages supported by databases like MySQL, adding additional XML functionality will definitely reduce your website performance. Sometimes you won’t have a choice and will need to upgrade your hardware to maintain your website’s performance. There is no rule of thumb for this issue. The decision should be based on each system and its engineering demands. My advice to you is to think two steps ahead. Try to predict what kind of future services your website will be providing. Plan your website properly at stage one and save yourself lots of effort later.
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.

Creating A Website That Sells in Toronto

Designing a good sales website can be the difference between losing a visitor and making a sale. You’ve got ten seconds to capture a viewer’s attention and convince them to stay—that’s how long it takes people to decide to keep reading, or move on.

Make Your Site User-Friendly

You need to plan your website carefully to make it really sell your product:

• Have an attention-grabbing headline that tells viewers what they’ll gain by staying. It should list some clear, compelling benefits—what they’ll learn and what kind of information you’ll provide.

• Keep your website clean and simple. It should be easy on the eyes, with no more than a couple of key colors and a couple of easy-to-read fonts. Font should be very dark and contrast strongly with a lighter background. Avoid using patterns and limit your use of graphics.

• Use more sales copy and fewer images. Derek Gehl, of http://MarketingTips.com, says, “Images should be used strategically to support the sales copy, not vice versa.”

• Make your navigation easy. It should run across the top of your page or down the left side. The fewer clicks it takes to purchase your product, the better, because every time you ask visitors to click, you lose some.

• Make your sales process quick and painless. Don’t use hidden links. If you want people to buy from you, you have to make it obvious how.

Develop Your Customers’ Trust

Your website has to convey credibility and professionalism—people in Toronto won’t buy from you if they don’t trust you. There are two main ways you can build your customers confidence in you:

1. Share your qualifications: how you got here and why you’re able to help them. Don’t just bullet-point your credentials—talk to them. Relate your experiences and explain how this product has helped you—let them see there’s a real person behind the site.

2. Use testimonials from people who’ve actually used your products. Video, audio, and written testimonials accompanied with customer pictures are proven tools for creating credibility with consumers. Recommends Gehl, “Make sure your testimonials have actual, measurable results people achieved using your product.”

Create Customer Loyalty

Sharing relevant, interesting information can be a tremendous point of sale. Tell your Toronto customers what your product is, where it originated, and innovative ways they can use it. If you sell camping gear, post articles about great destinations for camping, or tips for staying safe in the woods. Give people a reason to come back to your site—there’s a good chance that, while they’re there, they’ll buy something. By educating your customers, you create a sense of loyalty that will make them want to buy from you rather than your competitors.

www.Silentblast.com

Toronto Web Design

Let’s get a few things straight, quality equals increaase in customer response. Simple as that. We pride ourselves on producing top quality Toronto website that look prefoessional and more impoortantly BRING IN CUSTOMERS.

Over and over I have seen websites where the design looks like it was done on Frontpage by the “weekend programmer” or a purchased template. You can always spot those sites and I know from my own experience that when I am looking for products or services on the internet, that I am less likely to trust a business that has not taken the time to create a functional, aesthetically pleasing website.

If the business that I am considering to employ for products or services does not take their website seriously;

Will they take my order seriously?
Will the order get lost?
Will the service be less than their competitors?

All good questions. Especially when you are about to put your credit card number in for an order.

Good design could tip the balance and make the customer feel comfortable and trust that you will do what you say you will do.

Websites that look good get more business.

Design does matter and anyone that says it doesn’t, has not done their homework, or they do not surf the internet.

Businesses today cannot go on with a website that looks “homemade.”

Our Toronto web design projects are always receiving compliments long after they have been launched.

Trust me, design does matter. Spend the right amount of money, invest in your website and your website will pay you back for a very long time.

www.Silentblast.com

 

What makes a web design superb?

Web site development services open great doors of opportunity. As time passes, new services are discovered. These services are opened to both designers and the public. They greatly contribute to the growth of e-commerce and marketing.

Web designing is a huge canvass especially made for designers. It takes artistic passion and outstanding diligence to come up with one superb web design.

What therefore is superb web design? Simply, it is a web design tat catches the attention of the target visitors. Nonetheless, it does not stop there. It lingers in a way that visitors keep coming for more.

A superb web design is both excellent in form and function. Form delves into the aesthetic side of the wed site. Principles of art and the innate skill of the designer are the keys to achieve its excellence.

On the other hand, function is the meat of the web site. Every visitor has his or her own purpose in visiting your page. Usually, the reason is to research or to be acquainted with your products and services. Function must be complete and fulfilling. If there is information that needs to be divulged, say it. But the more powerful way to say it is by touching the heart through persuasion.

To be specific, here are some of the rules of thumb in web design:

1. Do not center everything. The same will just result to a scattered and disorganized look. Try to maximize space. It is there to serve a function. Do not overlook that function.

2. Applying contrast can be your designing edge. Contrast can be applied with color, size, value and weight of an image. Contrast has something to do with the clearness, brightness and volume of an image, logo or graphics. 3. Sections must be separated. The contents must be easy to read. To distinguish one section from the other, you can use thin line, borders or light colors. Another option is to use blank ‘buffer zones’ which is somewhat similar to the concept of borders the only difference is that invisible lines are made to separate the parts of a page.

4. To make your page functional, make certain that the information is tight and full. Proofread, edit and edit more.

Excellent form plus function makes an excellent web site.

www.Silentblast.com